China's Reclusive Math Genius Quietly Started Selling Primary-School Workbooks

The internet made Wei Dongyi a meme before it realized it was making fun of itself. In 2021, a clip of his campus interview went viral: a young Peking University professor blinking in the light, holding a plastic bottle of mineral water and a bag of steamed buns, answering questions about mathematics with the patient, untrimmed exactness of someone who has never once thought about being watched. He became, briefly, the symbol of the beautiful life no one has — a man so absorbed in his subject that he appeared to have forgotten to be interesting.

Now he has turned up in the one place the meme never anticipated: the e-commerce feed. On August 21, Peking University confirmed that an account selling two sets of primary-school mathematics workbooks was indeed his own. The workbooks, compiled by Wei himself, had sold more than ten thousand copies between them, with revenue passing 400,000 yuan. His cousins' Douyin storefronts soon stocked the same books.

The framing from commenters was affectionate and a little awestruck: the country's most famous mathematician was quietly selling math workbooks for children. But that framing mistakes the man. Wei has always been a teacher rather than a celebrity; the person who compiles a careful primary-school workbook is not a sellout but the only figure in the story who never noticed there was a stage to fall from.

The meme, in fact, was never quite true in the way people wanted it to be. The plastic bottle and the steamed buns were read as monkish asceticism, but they were really just unbeholdenness — the ordinary accoutrements of a mind that declined to notice the camera was rolling. His answer to the interviewer about his life outside mathematics was a polite lack of content. He was not performing humility; he had simply not arrived at the moment with a costume.

So the workbooks are of a piece with the man. They are the opposite of influencer merchandise: no lifestyle, no aesthetic, no aspirational self on the cover. Just a very precise, very ordinary artefact from someone who happens to find mathematics as natural as breathing and who, when asked to share it, picked the smallest possible scale — children, addition, the first staircase of the subject.

The public's reaction was a kind of double image. Thousands of orders arrived not because anyone thinks a primary-school workbook will make their child the next Wei Dongyi, but because buying the thing felt, to them, like standing near the quiet. In a marketplace saturated with people teaching you to be interesting, the most viral product of the week was a man selling you the one thing he actually knows.